I'm a big fan of legalization. But I can't endorse it for heroin and her pharmaceutical sister. Pretty much everything else including morphine and codeine et al., I think you should be able to make your own (even if they're stupid) decisions, and spend your life however you want as long as you're not hurting anyone else. But with heroin you lose the ability to choose. It takes over a part of you and forces you to do things. You become a hollow liar who will hurt everyone you love. There is a very very narrow way back that most people fall from, and there's not much else to say about it.

It's just too good of a drug. It makes you feel the literal best that you CAN even feel as a human, and then holds you there for hours. Then you're expected to come back to real life satisfied. It's just not possible for most people. Imagine the way you feel when your kid wins state, or when you have sex with a beauitful person that you connect with on a deep level. And now imagine that those feelings are so insignificant to someone who has tried heroin that they never care if they see them again. That's how good heroin is. It's killed a lot of people around me. It killed my aunt after 10 years of sobriety. It killed a girl who grew up on my street and used to beat up my sister. It just kills, and people know this, and they still can't stop taking it because it is so amazing. How do you compete with that?

The line you draw between opioids and other drugs is a false one. Addiction will happen regardless the medium you choose to express that addictive tendency.

And all of the empirical and anecdotal data shows that when you have easy access to things, you use better judgement.

For example: You can, at this very moment, ignore every single red light you encounter today in your car. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from doing it.

But you don't.

Why?

Same with heroin, or any other narcotic. It's a choice. And, the data proves that when people have the choice, they make the right one. (For some people, they make the wrong choice first, and then get turned around and make the right one. And some small percentage just die. But far fewer die than are murdered supporting an illegal trafficking market.)

The line you draw between opioids and other drugs is a false one. Addiction will happen regardless the medium you choose to express that addictive tendency.

. . .

Same with heroin, or any other narcotic. It's a choice.

Except different substances react with the body differently and opioid use literally reprograms your brain. So once you start going down that rabbit hole, it's pretty easy to get lost.

According to position papers on the treatment of opioid dependence published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Health Organization, care providers should not treat opioid use disorder as the result of a weak character or will.[21][22] Additionally, detoxification alone does not constitute adequate treatment.

Edit: The Wikipedia article has a video that's very informative in very plain English. It's very much worth a watch.

Right. Which is exactly my point: Legislating the use of the substance is dealing the the symptom of the problem, because one person can try heroin and decide it isn't for them, and another can get instantly addicted.

Whether it is legal or not has zero effect on that.

And, it turns out that when you just legalize everything, MUCH of the attraction of it goes away. (See: Portugal, Amsterdam, etc.) The illicit nature holds much of the initial appeal to throw caution to the wind, and try it out. Especially for people in the heady invincibility of youth.

Once you focus on the actual problem - why someone thinks it's a good idea to start taking mind-altering substances in the first place - then you get down to societal issues that need to be addressed through legislation and community programs, etc.

The substance abuse is simply a symptom of other problems. So legislating the use of a substance is never going to stop people from using it, and will always provide an easy market for n'er-do-well's to exploit.

I think we're mostly in agreement that it's important to treat heroin addicts as people who need medical help and not criminals. Where the disconnect comes in for me though, is that heroin is demonstrably much more dangerous than say alcohol or other types of illegal drugs, in its addictiveness, in the health problems it creates, the risk for and severity of overdoses, etc. With that in mind, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to aim to keep it from being produced and distributed, especially now that we're seeing it being made with more dangerous substances.

Yeah. It's not something either you or I are expert in, and it's a complex problem. But any time we have prohibited a substance in the USA, it has only increased its availability, and created a violent and profitable black market supply chain.

And, knowing the US Politician's tendency to stick a band-aid on major problems, and then run far away crowing about how they fixed it... I don't want to give them more power over a weakened and victimized populace that's already got a hard enough time fighting addiction, etc.

Make the politicians focus on the real issue, and don't give them an "easy out" or untenable platitude like, "Heroin is bad, mmmkay?" Prohibition has never worked for us. Liquor, drugs, nukes. It always fails and creates much worse secondary effects.

I think around here, things are getting bad enough that it's being taken seriously now. The other month, on the morning news, was a segment that was basically a public advisory that could be summarized as "There's some bad heroin in the area right now and a few people have died from it already. If you have loved ones with problems, keep an eye on them, make sure you have Naloxone and if you don't, here's a number you can call to find where you can get some. The county sherif is saying that they will not make any arrests in response to 911 calls for overdose and here is a list of numbers you can call if you or a loved one needs help with substance abuse."

Let's be honest. That's a shitty thing to have to handle. The fact that's on the news though? It's amazing. People out there, in power, know it's a problem and they're working with eachother to try and handle it. Silver linings.

Yeah, but a lot of times situations like these are exactly why state and county organizations exist. This is a big country with a ton of different economies and cultures and challenges. Shit that might work in New York might not work in New Mexico, so really they oughta focus on big things, like collecting taxes, national security, diplomatic relations, etc., and really trust the States and smaller governments to implement policies that work for them. You know, as long as they're fair and constitutional and shit.

Although I still think that the author is getting tangled up a bit with their cause-and-effect analysis.

The opioid epidemic can pretty much be traced right back to the doctors who over-prescribed them in the first place, and thereby transitioning opioids from "street drugs" to "my doctor gave it to me, so it's safe!"

Once you make that mental leap, sharing "prescription drugs" with others - or selling your extras, or prescribing it for people who are simply addicted - becomes a really easy justification to make.

The big picture is that, where we are now, there is no easy path to the light at the top of this hole.

My personal take is that legalization and criminalization are not antonyms but represent two extremes of a thorny problem - mainly that the "victimless" in "victimless crime" is entirely dependent on how you define the externalities. Your "stupid decisions" are entirely your own problem up to the point where you break into my wife's mailbox hunting for checks to cash (as happened last night). Except not even that's true because by the time you're breaking into strangers' mailboxes looking for checks to cash, you've likely torn a swath of destruction through your extended family that extends from unpaid loans to purse raidings to check fraud.

The threat of punishment is failing to curb most people's addictions. It's foolish to assume that the abstract threat of jail at some point in the indeterminate future will have a deterrent effect when the majority of crimes committed by addicts are crimes of opportunity.

I don't have any pet solutions to this problem. I don't know what works. I know that society is rarely served by increasing the prison population and I know that when you incentivize doctors to prescribe addictive substances to patients you are likely to end up with more addicts. Is that their fault? Should they know better? Don't we all wish. The problem with most "you do you, I do me" forms of government and policing end up with the failures living a hardscrabble existence outside the barricades while those of us who don't fail are still talking over security options with the goddamn landlord.

I don't remember where I heard it, but someone described heroin as a high interest rate credit card for your pleasure centers. You can spend well beyond your means but once you hit your credit limit the bills are murder.

My high school posse has a bodycount of 5 associated with heroin and its distribution.

Yeah. People are going to steal, cheat, kill, all sorts of stuff. And they'll do that for all sorts of reasons. And those things are already crimes, so why criminalize the reasons why they're doing it? I would much prefer a treatment mentality than a criminalization mentality. Hopefully that turns up.

And victimless is a hard situation to actually be in. I mean, if a mom's doing heroin after dropping the kid off at kindergarden, and usually is totally ready to come get him at the end of the day, what happens when she nods off and he needs to come home early? That's like the most lighthearted situation I could think of! But the same can be said for funcitoning alcoholics. It's all a nasty thing that people do to themselves.

Buddy of mine started divorce proceedings against his wife when she blew a 0.14. A samaritan had reported her bouncing off the barriers on the freeway and then saw kids in the car seats in back. They weren't even buckled in.

Except that's not true. He started divorce proceedings when one of them got her arm caught in the gate and stood next to the house screaming for 45 minutes because her sister couldn't wake mommy up.

Except that's not true either. She divorced him when she determined it was more expedient to just bang her meth dealer since he was a CI and was never prosecuted nor had his supply interrupted.

Kids are fine now, thank god but no. There are no jocular involvements between addiction/alcoholism and children. I got the scars to prove it.

It's fair to say that if you're on methadone, you have beaten the system and are winning bigly.

I don't understand. Is this a Trump reference? Or is the point that it's really difficult to get access to methadone clinics? My gut tells me that it's really easy to get access what with the amount of people I see nodding off most places I look around Baltimore. Then again, they might actually be on the drugs themselves and not in treatment, but this is all my gut talking.

That said, this article by The Upshot is pretty outstanding interactive journalism. Especially the county-by-county breakdown of shares of overdose deaths. Ohio looks so rough.